Local ballerina Morgan Gerlinsky is making her mark in the world of dance, and was recently accepted to a summer program at the coveted Royal Winnipeg Ballet.
Morgan’s instructor and Silhouette artistic director, Jake Hastey, said it is an amazing accomplishment for the 11-year-old dancer, who wowed judges at an Edmonton audition back in October.
“In Canada we really only have two true professional ballet programs, being the Royal Winnipeg and the National Ballet School . . . so the fact that she’s going to be taking part in that at this age is a sign for the work that she’s done and also her potential for the future,” Hastey said.
“They hold auditions all over Canada in every major city, so she was in competition with high-level dancers from across (every major city in the country) and they only accept a handful of kids into the summer program, so it’s a pretty illustrious accomplishment.”
Morgan will stay in residence at the Royal Winnipeg Ballet from June 29 to July 30 among some of the country’s top dancing prospects and most renowned instructors hoping to fine-tune her ballet skills.
Hastey said it has been a pleasure working alongside a student with the passion and tenacity for dance that Morgan shows on a daily basis.
“She was always a really intelligent student and she always applied herself in class. I’d say the main difference for her was that over the past couple of years she started to basically take the work home . . . and she just fell in love with dance,” Hastey said. “As that came through, it became really evident in all of the work that she did, and in the last year she’s just come alive.”
Morgan’s mother, Carmen Gerlinsky, couldn’t be happier to see her daughter reach such levels of success at such a young age.
“I’m thrilled for her. There were a couple years when she was quite young that she wanted to quit but I encouraged her to keep going, and she did and now she loves it,” Carmen said, adding that her daughter puts around 17 hours into dancing each week. “She would dance more if I would let her, really.”
Carmen said that if there was a moment when she realized Morgan had the potential to truly go places with her dancing, it was when she teamed up with Hastey just over five years ago.
“When Jake Hastey started teaching her, that’s when she really got passionate about it and took off,” Carmen said.
Morgan said that Hastey has taught her “pretty much everything” she knows about dancing in the five years they have been working together, but added that he tends to poke fun at her facial expressions.
“He bugs me a lot about my face,” she said with a giggle. “He says I have to smile more.”
Hastey got a laugh out of Morgan’s comment, and admitted he does poke fun at her “math-test face” when she dances to encourage her to include more personal expression.
“I do, which sounds horrible . . . It’s more the thinking face,’” Hastey said with a laugh, adding that Morgan has done well to bring more personal expression into her dancing over the past few years.
“You have to be willing to bring a part of yourself, and I think that she’s grown immensely in that over the past two to three years, and I think that was probably one of the things that they saw in the audition, and one of the things that we’re seeing in class as well as on stage, bringing herself into her art.”
Morgan said she is excited to spend the month in residence at the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, which will be her first extended stay away from home, and while she added she might feel a little nervous, her mother believes she will excel.
“I’m going to miss her, but I think she’s going to do just fine,” Carmen said. “It’s a chance to dance more than what she can currently can dance here and to learn from different instructors. It’s going to be a whole life experience, living in residence with a bunch of other wannabe dancers. It will be a very big growing experience.”
